As with the present title, the latter books appeared as co-publishing ventures with the State Library of Victoria. Much credit is due to this publishing partnership, which has enabled Australians and international readers to gain a better appreciation of the cultural riches accumulated by Victoria’s State Library since its foundation in the 1850s. Those curators who work in Australia’s national, state, and university libraries rightly resent the charge that is made too often and too loosely that their collections of rare and fragile materials are ‘hidden’ from public view. But there is no doubt that inspired publishing programs of the kind offered by the collaborative enterprise of the Miegunyah Press and the State Library of Victoria can reach out to a wider and more general audience of readers than the inevitably smaller and more specialised community of dedicated scholars who have privileged access to the rare materials reading rooms of Australia’s research libraries.

On the evidence gained from my regular visits to bookshops in Sydney, MUP has done an excellent job in distributing this latest book. Designed by Pfisterer + Freeman, the Melbourne firm of graphic designers who also produced the previous volumes in what is, in all but name, a series, the present book is certainly a pleasure to look at and to handle. Along with its fine design, excellent paper stock and spacious layout, the book trades on the romantic appeal of old maps both to the imagination of armchair travellers and adventurers and as visual objects of considerable beauty in their own right.

It is a pity, then, that there is a disjunction between the visual content and Matthew Richardson’s rambling, episodic, eclectic, and opinionated text. This is not to call into question this writer’s industry or his enthusiasm, which will be remembered from his graceful and lively Once a Jolly Swagman: The Ballad of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ (2006), an exploration of a local and very different terrain, and which deservedly won high acclaim. For his new book, he has certainly read widely and deeply. Richardson is an energetic researcher, but also a quirky one. He has gone back to the surviving texts of the ancient historians to place into the context of their times the maps that were the expression both of conquests and of discovery. But his enthusiasms (and sometimes the anger and disdain he expresses for modern scholarship) are those not of the professional geographer, but rather of the amateur and, in a highly specialised field, the autodidact.

Bartolomeu Valho, 1568, facsimile in Portugaliae Monumenta Cartografi ca, Vol.2, plate 297. Image courtesy of State Library of Victoria.

Richardson has his heroes and his enemies. On the side of the angels, Edward Gibbon, author of the monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), is rhetorically lauded as ‘Britain’s greatest historian’. Gibbon’s narrative sweep is offered as a vindication of Richardson’s otherwise despised ‘single narrative approach’ to the writing of history. Since Gibbon’s time, we are told, ‘a prejudiced myopia’ has narrowed the horizons of those who in our time guide the Western perspective on the past. W.A.R. Richardson, the academic author of Was Australia Charted before 1606?: The Jave la Grande Inscriptions (2006), is scathingly demolished for his argument that the (in any case) much disputed Dieppe maps drawn in sixteenth-century France from smuggled Portuguese charts do not offer proof of early European discoveries of Australia before the time of Cook.

As a point of honour, Richardson states that the system he has followed in his book for treating ancient history is to discard the claims, the insights and the conclusions of later historians. While this fiat may lead him to a keener awareness of the contemporary values, mores and wisdom of the ancients, it is surely a kind of demagoguery and soap-box chauvinism to dismiss the refinements, nuances, and insights of educated modern scholarship as mere ‘learned folklore’. But Richardson doesn’t stop there. He is not the first and he won’t be the last to rail against modern academic trends and the whims of fashion, but is this book the place for the lament (some of it prejudiced and some demonstrably inaccurate), which is offered as a catalogue of the decay of Western civilisation? In a curious sideswipe against his own construct of an ascendant West, Richardson mutters darkly about ‘losses to the spirit, as Christianity yielded to secular materialism; losses to the intellect when the Enlightenment fizzled into nineteenth-century pedantry; losses to creativity as poetry surrendered and art decayed; losses to learning as classical studies gave place to vocational courses, and classical philosophy was overturned by post-structuralism, group-functional intermutualism and other degenerate drivel’.

Richardson’s thesis (oddly positioned at the end of the book in a note on explanations and sources) presents the past as a single narrative running from deep antiquity to the present. As Richardson describes it, that narrative ‘unifies the history of the Far East and the Far West, of the most ancient civilisation and the youngest colony and societies in between’. It is from these many strands of history that the present dominance of the West has evolved, not as an historical constant, but as an offshoot of Asian history and of a previous Eastern dominance. As a broad proposition, this is hardly as revelatory as Richardson or his publicist would have us believe. But as an overarching narrative it provides the means to make sense of a selection of more than a hundred maps that serve to identify what Richardson calls ‘the emergence, character and career of the West’ – the great theme of his passionate but sometimes eccentric exposition of the history of world mapping. The journey we travel on with Richardson in this book is a strange one, indeed.